Developments

There used to be animals, the latest litter

of kittens being fed on the street by strangers,

or racoons rolling across the uncultivated grounds

along the railroad tracks,

and birds, countless birds, stretched across the sky

perched on high voltage wires, starlings

mostly, but also crows and occasionally

a falcon would show from God knows where.

Now, they are gone. Construction is

mostly responsible. But there was more to it:

ill-informed young men had heard racoons

were always rabid and would attack them,

so, they poisoned them. And they poisoned

the cats, too, because they reproduced;

no one had thought to fix them and that that

would do. And the tall buildings placed where

before there were giant black trees made

the place incommodious to the birds

who used to range their rainbows in the spring.

Oh, how I miss them. Miss them all badly.

How gladly would I replace the people

for their preening and unconsidered living.

How much more than a motel

was the murmuration of those birds.

Listening To The Voice of Virginia Woolf

It was always

reaching a crescendo

then descending

like a shirt ironed

with a hiss from the steam

released like the tide

the rattle of pebbles-

I saw it with my eyes.

It returned always

the way words do

that fill a line

and make it stable-

earth shoveled into

a garden and into

a burial plot, too.

Petals open

our own tiny sun.

Shaking out the sea

it sparkles and bears

witness to the bodily

shape of memories. To some

it is ironclad law that is all

and holds within it

such dread as to not

be considered at all.

Who but a poet would associate

incarnadine with multitudinous

seas? Ah, words went

breathing and traveling

from street to street

picking up habits

remembered for centuries

becoming lips and speech.

The Examination

The doctor’s nurse will lay you down

on crumpling paper on a metal table

and place electrodes on your chest and arms.

She will record your heart rhythms

and be satisfied with the results

if they are regular and recur.

The test has its limits: it tells the heart’s

electrical currents. It does not know

the many hurts it suffered, or when it started

fighting back with all its umbrage.  

I am surprised that they separate the heart

from the rest of the life, as if we did not belong

to an interrelated organism.

Afterwards, she will escort you to a waiting room,

where everyone sits alone and no one

talks or looks around. She will leave you there

where everyone wants to hear

their name called out and their hearts unstimulated

go on beating alone.